At the centre of us all lies a wonderful void, which is the hollow boulder of our soul, the infinite space of the corridor of the stars, where the wind of God blows, and upon which the dark beauty of the eyes truly is the window. God is in us, and we are like masks and veils and walls and mounds upon the spirit of God. In our centre we are of the infinite and yet there is nothing of us in there, and each of us is a chameleon labyrinth, a garden maze around what we are all at heart: not us, individually, but us and creation entire, as at home as at heart.
And each of us has to strip back to uncover God, to discover the Spirit which moves in us all. The Chameleon constantly changes colour, filling with the shifting complexion of the meadow, a plural mind and body dancing, embracing every correspondence in himself and the world around him. And each matching of creation from within turns a veil transparent, vaults a wall, turns a corner in the maze, crosses a threshold and brings the mystery we inhabit and the mystery which inhabits us closer to a marriage, which is the discovery of our soul and the Spirit of God. Songs and rites of the Chameleon are as hyphens between our own nature and the world around us, leaving the walls of the labyrinth standing but turning them crystal, bringing to One the God of Life and the God of Death.
Thus do we divine the infinite variety of routes, the infinite possibility of our own history, the infinite variety of the meadow in which we live, discovering infinite simplicity, infinite beauty.
There are myriad roads to God.
On m’accuse; mais le paradis?
C’est vraie, et vraiment je tu le donnerais… mais… Je t’aime, et on m’accuse.
I expect you to howl, really; I could expect nothing less, tragediènne mondiale, boy or girl; it’s ever the way that we don’t meet who can really speak, or we don’t speak who rarely meet, and the tragedy of your lives outlives you, and rubs on me as you bruise past inflicting, helplessly, your own rejection upon yourselves. How I wish I had dropped a gingerbread trail!
Of course man is absolutely overwhelmed with magic.
Nor am I the first to sit beneath the clouds at sunset with a drink or two inside me and say ‘you bastards!’ in the face of such beauty – for they float swankily in the ease of their god-given state, and only we find that degree of honesty difficult, find ugliness easy, artifice cheap.
Yet… that too is the beauty when it cries to the cloud tops, or the depths of the cistern, the song surge is everything, for it is the response of man, absolutely overwhelmed with magic.
I suppose one day I will quite simply walk off the edge of the planet and out, across, back, into eternity. And the voice that calls me into eternity so clearly now in my everyday life creates also the stunning beauty of all that warms to heartbeat and seedpod about me, so that in the huge emptiness of the wind on the salt-marsh, the edge of infinity, brittle little mammal bones of man, little lively sweet limbs with downy hairs, the untranslatably beautiful moments of the intimacy of our knowledge of our being flesh and blood and breathing and tasting, kissing and laughing are infinitely precious, and demand an intimate communion with the life of others, that no living relationship gives, except in moments of total sacrifice.
So that life teaches us constantly to be individual, to walk away from the edge of infinity in the eyes of another, in the madness of another.
And the wilderness says other. On the edge, out where it is so far that the song may simply disappear on the wind, we can touch each other in rites that can no longer hurt the individual man, but strip we naked earthmen back to God, with a proud death.
So he and I, who had played and laughed together, went out there into the far desert of our ancestors. For the first and only time we were unrestrainedly intimate, and we rubbed our sperm into the ribs of our ancestors which were placed around there, and we sat and spoke of the blessings of our lives as we broke the thin bones of our ancestors in our hands, and placed small pebbles in each of the eyes of the skulls. Finally, we rose and faced each other, and as we had practiced many times we judged our pace and line, and lifting our limbs, we struck at each other, the perfectly timed blow, never losing that gaze, as arms whirled, into each other’s eyes.
Who stood, watching the majestic ash tree soar!
Thus do we all make use of childhood’s passions stirred, instilled, who knows, into hearts of wonder, wherein all children are at heart as lovers, and take into their fragile, thirsty frames the language to interpret their unforeseeable destinies. Nor is it base to see, years later, the child desire arise, bewildered, hungry in the forgotten architecture of an aging man, and cry and curse.
Nor is the language of love unwise to relocate a life in older years, drifting on the plain of its destiny, in the bosom of creation wherein it was born. Cry cock! Cry cunt! Watch the tree soar, watch its branches sway, the skirt of its leaves whip! Cry life!
So might we all, in spite of the dogged and humdrum, at nightfall – or better still, to start the day - join hands in an orgy of affirmation: to espouse trust, honesty, dependence and the shared ecstasy of a lust for life.
O lazy summer’s evening sounds, as light delights the harebells below the marram swatch, songs of the seals borne on the faint wind from the estuary’s banks in the dusty mirage haze, while the marram heads nod and bees warm to the day’s-end harvest with a hum in the vetch, where swallows gather over shore-side reed beds, kissing backwards and forwards above the tops, turning the dusty sunset blues bluer still, turning this into an oasis of the heart amid sands of waste.
Coming to the edge of the desert, it seems, we encounter the meadow… walking off the end of the world, out of the hall of nothing, the river of stars (which is exploding flora) takes our weary bodies for a swim… life refreshes the deadened spirits of too leaden desires, and explodes the voice of infinity specifically within.
In this bay of milk in the light tinsel shiver of first rain over grey and silver (emerald sands underlining), we hold hands, surfaced like seals to tell of moments only turning the high proud age of blown mist cirrus bands which put a fog on the desert and plant a jewel in the heart (condensed), and we bow before a thousand million white butterflies, and the arabesques of angels, till, turning ever, we run the shore in full shower where steps will flash crimson in sunset’s fire; so I, being ever so far, call you to enter the eye of mystery, and watch me honour the breath of life which we call love.
I have a vision of stars and wildflowers, and that is all and everything, of such transcendent embracing loveliness that the salt and dust of every dancing troubled breast is loved in that so supremely there is no evil could match or dominate the singular, beautiful simplicity of godlike this, which is, ourselves, ultimately, and even now, stars and wildflowers.
Stand firm before the torturer, the desolate fashion of despair; around your heart build a cordon full of wildflowers, a hem of stars, some wooden stairs and a gate; go there and unroll a carpet marked with some good you know; dream on it, then speak of it, let it be all you ever show.